1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to using a data processing system to provide information for optimizing treatment of oil and gas wells. More specifically, the present invention relates to using a geographic user interface system operating on a data processing system to aid in the analysis of well production and treatment data. Also, the present invention allows for the comparison of a company's proprietary data with that of a competitor's data, existing on a publicly available database, from an economic standpoint.
2. Description of the Related Art
Well service companies are in the business of treating oil and gas wells to enhance or control their production. Well service companies also prospectively plan the treatments for groups of wells which have not yet been drilled. Treatments such as well cementing ("a cement job"), pumping acid into a formation ("an acid job"), pumping proppant into a formation ("a frac job"), and using coiltubing and production enhancing chemicals are several well known treatments performed when servicing a well. However, these and other treatments not mentioned are expensive and must be used selectively in order to render the recovery of petroleum products from a treated well cost effective. Complicating this matter further is the fact that each well is unique and will respond to treatments in different ways. How a well responds to a given treatment depends on an almost infinite number of factors, such as the geologic and reservoir parameters for the well, and the well's production and completion history. Each job must be specifically designed to account for the unique characteristic of the well. Thus, there is no one treatment program or set of treatments which can regularly be used in a cost effective manner to treat wells in general.
To combat this problem, well service companies have traditionally relied upon experienced individuals who acquire a "feel" for how to treat wells in a given area. In many instances, wells which are located next to one another share important geologic characteristics. For instance, the geology of the rock surrounding a group of closely spaced wells may be similar, and these wells may be drawing the same petroleum product from the same reservoir. In these instances, treatments employed on one well may be highly predictive of how that same treatment would work on a neighboring well. Individuals who have spent years in the same area come to develop an intuition or experience about how best to treat a well in the area with which they are familiar.
Although these individuals can be fairly accurate in predicting how a well in the area with which they are familiar will respond to a given treatment, well service companies understand that relying upon the memory of a small group of individuals is not an ideal way to conduct business. When an individual leaves the company, for whatever reason, the company is deprived of that individual's expertise about the wells in a given area.
In addition to relying upon experienced individuals, well service companies, from time to time, gather large amounts of data for wells in a given area, and analyze this data to determine the best treatment for the wells in that area. Extensive data exists for almost every oil and gas well found in the United States and Canada. Various state, provincial, and federal regulatory agencies regularly require that data about the production and treatment of wells be submitted to them. This data then becomes public knowledge after the well becomes non-confidential. For several years, the Petroleum Information Company (PI) and others have collected this data from the various state, provincial and federal regulatory agencies, and well operators. Once collected, PI and the other companies insert this data into their own large databases. Oil companies commonly access these databases to aid their exploratory and reservoir engineering tasks. For a fee, well service companies can also access these databases to retrieve information for a group of wells. However, to date, these databases have rarely been used by well service companies to design well treatments, as there has been no way to integrate or organize data from private and public sources into a single database structure.
Well service companies also collect an extensive amount of data for each well they treat. The data collected by the well service companies is much more detailed for any given well than the data collected by PI, and hence, is much more useful.
When gathering information about a group of wells, well service companies will be able to obtain data from a company such as PI, in addition to any data they have on-hand regarding their treatment of wells in the area. This data can be organized and presented to an engineer for his analysis.
A large amount of data for a group of wells can be collected in this manner. However, performing an effective analysis of data in this form is difficult at best. The data is often contained on several hundred or thousands of sheets of paper. Due to this large amount of paper, analyzing the most relevant information is difficult. Also, the spatial relationships between a group of wells are difficult to visualize when the location of the wells is simply specified by sets of coordinates.
Further, other wells are often overlooked, as it is assumed that the best information on how to treat a given well comes from the wells around it. While this is often the case, wells are sometimes discovered with characteristics very different from those of its neighbors. In these situations, the best information about how to treat the well may come from an examination of wells located some distance away from the well under study. These distant wells may share important characteristics with the well under study, but may be overlooked because the engineer was only looking at nearby wells, as the current industry practice is to focus only on neighboring wells.
Thus, a system which can manage well data originating from several sources is needed. This system should allow a user to quickly and easily review the production and treatment data available for a set of wells. This system should also provide the user with a display which allows the user to view the location of surrounding wells relative to the well under study. This display should allow the user to manipulate and query the wells surrounding the well under study to determine the surrounding wells' production and treatment characteristics. Further, this system should allow a user to engage in a new methodology of determining the best treatment for a well.
Further, this system should allow a search of all past or distant wells so a user can compare the relevant characteristics of these wells to the well under study.
Finally, this system should allow a well service company to compare its internal data with data from well treatments performed by itself and others, so the well service company can asses the relative cost and economic efficiency of its well treatments in comparison to other well treatments which have been performed.